This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[180]
The loss in the division under my command in this battle was in killed 89 and wounded 639, to-wit: in Hays' brigade, 5 killed and 40 wounded; Trimble's brigade (Hoke's), 8 killed and 98 wounded; Lawton's brigade, 55 killed and 369 wounded; my own brigade (Walker's), 17 killed and 114 wounded; and in the artillery of the division 3 killed and 18 wounded. Among the killed were Lieutenant Colonel Scott of the 12th Georgia Regiment, and Captain D'Aquin of the artillery, and among the wounded were Colonel Atkinson of the 26th Georgia Regiment (in the hands of the enemy), Captain E. P. Lawton, A. A. G. Lawton's brigade (Lawton mortally wounded and in the hands of the enemy) and Colonel Lamar, 61st Georgia Regiment.
General Lee's entire loss in the battle was in killed 458, and wounded, 3,743, to-wit: in Longstreet's corps, 130 killed, 1,276 wounded; in Jackson's corps, 328 killed and 2,454 wounded; and 13 wounded in Stuart's cavalry.
The enemy's loss was very much heavier, and over 900 prisoners, more than 9,000 stand of arms and a large quantity of ammunition fell into our hands.
The failure of General Lee to attempt to destroy the enemy's army after its repulse has been much criticised, and many speculations about the probable result of an attempt to drive the enemy into the river have been indulged in by a number of writers.
In the first place, it must be recollected that no man was more anxious to inflict a decisive blow on the enemy than General Lee himself, and none understood better the exact condition of things, and the likelihood of success in any attempt to press the enemy after his defeat on the 13th.
That defeat was a repulse with very heavy loss, it is true, but it was not a rout of the enemy's army; and candid persons ought to presume that General Lee knew what he was about and had very good and sufficient reasons for not sallying from his line of defence, upon the exposed plains below, to make the attempt to convert the repulse into a rout.
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.